Fatal Exception's Neil McAllister gets into the holiday spirit with a post that gives thanks to technical advances for developers, including open source tools, modern IDEs, and distributed version control. 'I'm old enough to remember when performance-critical routines meant hand-coded assembly language and sometimes even keying in machine code as hexadecimal digits. We've come a long way since those bad old days, and not surprisingly we owe a lot of our progress to technology. So for this Thanksgiving, here are just a few of the modern advances for which I, as a developer, give thanks.' What are you giving thanks to?

I remember the days of TSS when you would get billed for the amount of time you spent logged into your terminal. So we had to literally handwrite our programs then pass them to a team of women who's job was just typists. They'd input our code then print out the errors so that we could then start the painful process of debugging by pen and paper.

Kids these days don't realise how easy they have it with their ability to compile and digitally debug their own code same day (let alone instantly) and with meaningful error messages. Not to mention (not so) modern IDEs with watches (et al) and even tools like dtrace if you ever end up completely stumped.

(this is usually the point where someone links to that XKCD sketch about how real programmers use butterflies hehehe)